We Were All Victims
by TayteFFN
Summary: Times of Turmoil: An Abridged History of the Fall of Caelin by an honest-to-goodness Etrurian Because being a good person isn't good enough anymore. A tale of patriotism, rebellion, bad luck and forbidden romances--told with a short attention span!
1. Foreword

**It's great to be able to write fanfiction for homework. **

**I've always wanted to write about Caelin's political situation during the times of Lyndis's Legions-from Caelin's point of view. I found something better. In any case, prepare yourself for a new look on the effects of Lyndis's Legions on Caelin. If I can hang through on this one, well, we're going to have to redefine the good, the bad and-dare I say it?-the poor, unfortunate bastards trapped under my fingertips. Luckily, the narrator I chose should keep things from getting dumpy and depressing, but let me know if I'm failing. **

**In any case, I should be sleeping right now and have only got six hours to do it, so I'll just let you guys read. It's a little thick in the beginning, but that's because this narrator doesn't ever shut up and finally gets to the point in the third to last line. (laughs) I love him. **

**Now then, shoo, shoo. Go read.**

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**We All Were Victims**

**By Tayte**

**Times of Turmoil: An Abridged History of the Fall of Caelin (by an honest-to-goodness Etrurian)**

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Foreword**

I do not presume to be an expert in this field. As a humble Etrurian of comfortable means and charged with governing the House Caerlon for the entirety of my life—or until I may retire it to my heir (who is still thirteen at the moment)—I myself have not been able to so much as glance upon the harvest-gold fields of what used to be called Caelin within the entirety of my life. (I agonize that I have neither ventured out of the borders of Etruria itself either, Goddess bless it). My interest in the history of Caelin starts with the history of my mother, Lady Priscilla. As a young woman, she found her long-lost brother in the ranks of Caelin's army. In fact, as it turns out, he later fell in love with Lady Lyndis, Caelin's heir apparent. That my mother once dabbled with this lady, a woman with over seventy-four attempts to her life, intrigued me. Before long, however, I grew weary of how little my mother was able to tell me of her.

I did not dare ask my uncle about this. He was always a sour kind of person, and I only dare write that right now because he's dead, and I pray my own mother doesn't roll over in her grave at my disrespect. But I only speak the truth.

But I digress. In my quest to uncover the most complete elements of the intriguing goings-on of Caelin, I had formally invited anyone with knowledge of these events to my home for a good, long chat by the fire. I started with connections of my mother, connections who had also dabbled with Lady Lyndis. They recollected a rich, sentimental, and not entirely believable tale, one that included dragons. (As far as I'm concerned, those have been extinct for a thousand years and should never be brought up again. Ever.) They also painted the Lady Lyndis in the most glorious light, an idol of perfection, a headstrong beauty with a strong sense of justice and a pure and innocent heart. The most fascinating part of these entreaties is that I collected the same story from seven different people during seven different meetings occurring over a span over thirteen years, including Lady Louise of our own House Reglay, the Lycian monk Lucius, a Sacaen wanderer named Guy, my good friend Merlinus the merchant, a fine young heart-throb bard called Nils, an Ilian pegasus knight Farina, and my mother, of course. Nonetheless, as exciting as the tale was, I quickly became bored with the pinnacle characters. People are not so good, and story-mongers like myself do not like pinnacle characters that are so good.

And so, soon after I married my most beautiful wife Eliza, I left my thirst for the history of Caelin and Lady Lyndis in some cranny in the back of my head. Then one spring morning came a man jaded and bitter with the world, cursing fate, luck, the gods, the Goddess, mankind and everything else in existence. I don't remember what he was wearing that day, but he was a very practical sort of man, a fellow who rarely spoke an unnecessary word. But he came upon my manse and announced to my guards that he had a tale for me, and he may well have been the only one alive to tell it.

I was not at all hesitant in granting him an audience, for I had just finished the year's tax reports and sent them off to the king, and greatly needed some entertainment, the kind of entertainment my wonderful Eliza's chatter could not provide. A good man-to-man, heart-to-heart chat was what I needed, and my wife was not a man. (And that is a good thing, but I digress again.)

And so it was this man and I found ourselves seated across from each other at our informal dining room, for I did not wish for us to be barred by formality and directly told him so. He nodded solemnly, and I could tell from the look on his face that his tale would be a painful one to share. After the expected introductions, he began with the very words I've made the title of this tome: "We all were victims." And with that, he proceeded in telling a tale that wove itself over lunch and coffee, settled through an afternoon shower, filled a roast pig with soulful stuffing, and outlived the day and most of the night before it could expire to the moaning pre-dawn winds. I was so moved that I asked him how I could show him my thanks beyond a good bed, breakfast, coffee—maybe even a few more nights of rest in the manse?

His reply was a stern one, and it rang in his voice as if this was now the question of the fulfillment of his life. Here is his charge, word for word:

"Let the world know."

I then understood his purpose for approaching me. I, being outside of Caelin, and outside of Lycia, could with unbiased eye recount the tumultuous happenings of the fall of Caelin. At that time, I only felt it right to follow his command to the dot, to the cross of the T, and only later realized the enormous complications I would encounter. Before I could finish penning this history, I met again with five of the seven connections from my mother, started (timid) correspondence with the lords of Ostia and Pherae, had my three children (Peter, Valentine and Andrew), discovered shocking secrets about my own heritage, nearly went insane when Eliza disappeared (she got lost in Etruria-Ilia mountain borders, but she's safe and sound in Ilia now), and wore out my eyes reading multitudes of Caelinic histories, accounts, and letters of old times that good old Merlinus was able to gather for me during his travels. Beyond that, I have aged across my middle ages, grown from naïve young man to a steadily plodding father, stopped growing hair out the top of my head, and have recently started to worry about the condition of my teeth. And the inevitable meeting with my dead, sour uncle.

But that is for me alone to face later on. As for my final thoughts regarding this, I can only pray those who find this tome will take from it as much as I have, if not more. It is a mistake to ignore history, for that is precisely the reason it reoccurs. That is precisely the reason the existence of humanity is "a mere cycle of birth, struggle, death and rebirth." And though the struggle for Caelin is lost forevermore, I will be so vain as to demand this be a chapter remembered in the whole of Lycia's glorious rise (a glorious rise capped with the victory over Bern twenty years ago).

And with that, I give you the almost forgotten story of Joan Orleans of Caelin.

Most sincerely,

Johnnathan Caerlon

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**Joan Orleans is a completely intentional reference of Joan d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans.**

**Not entirely sure this story is going to have _action _in it per se. Actually, I find it very refreshing. Hopefully you do too. Thanks for your time! Toodles!**


	2. Introduction

**Wow. Incredibly late. Well, school's over, so let's get to business. And post something before my parents drag me away for three days to a resort where I will spend most of my time rotting my brain watching Total Drama Island. Don't worry about it being short. I'll post more before Friday. :D ...Honestly, it doesn't look that short on a word document...**

**To clear some things up:**

**Imuka: In this story, Nils did not go back. ...And apparently...neither did Ninian. (shrug) I don't know how it works yet, but we'll all find out at some point. I've also started taking liberties with Elibes map. Caelin the canton is now stretched very wide east-to-west. Hey, all they do is point out cities, not how the cantons are arranged border-wise. Yay for loopholes!  
**

**This is now set twenty or so years after FE6.**

**GunLord500: After five years of searching my brother found FE6 in English. Now I can work on that too. As for Lyn and Fiora, they just happened to be canon characters who (as I see it now) will have a greater role in this story than other canon characters.**

**Thanks for reviewing, y'all! (bad Southern accent-'kay, I live on the opposite end of the USA.)  
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"_The delays were absolute catastrophes that year! Trade in wool, spices, cloth—all in ruin! There were quite possibly more pegasus knights in Lycia than in Ilia itself! Lord Eliwood had ordered a dragon-piece chess set from Worde as a wedding gift to his wife Ninian. I had upended all the Pheraen treasuries, stores and my wares three times, seeking some case or package marked with that familiar dragonfly seal the day before the wedding—only to realize it had never come!"_

_~Merlinus, Financial Advisor to House Pherae_

**Introduction:**

Geographically speaking, Caelin used to be the center canton of the Lycian League. Naturally, this put it on the most direct route between all non-adjacent cantons, and with Bern and Etruria. In fact, one Araphen nobleman claimed that it was all straight lines; all roads met at one epicenter, the capital, with geometric patches of farmland filling the gaps. The decades before its disappearance from proper maps were filled with such marvelous commerce that its prosperity rivaled even that of the Lycian capitol, Ostia. Its cavalry was only second to Pherae, and at that time it contained the fastest courier services in the continent. (This system of a relay of "stations" with fresh horses is in fact the predecessor of our own. The elements were introduced thirty eight years ago to our now missing Count Reglay by the current headmaster of The Foray [1], Master Erk). Named by its founder to mean "passion" and "fire" in the Other Tongue [2], Caelin is the origin of the romantic ballads of damsels in distress and chivalric heroism made popular by Nils the Bard. In fact, according to the journals of the long-lost legacy, Tactician Galan Cecil, the prominence of such romantic notions was so much so that Lady Lyndis' first impression of Caelin was "home of callow oafs with loose tongues."

Unlike the other cantons of Lycia, Caelin—and the self-proclaimed "independent" port city of Badon—were not among the ruling states established by Roland of the Eight Heroes. Caelin had once been an exclave of the significantly larger neighboring canton of Laus. Separated by a small gulf, it drifted apart in culture and suffered executive neglect and political inequality with the mainland. By taking the banner of Ostia in the Ost-La [3] war of 776, it declared independence on July 4th and defeated the then mighty House of Laus.

A strange pair of benevolent dictators took power immediately. The wise twin brothers Lugh and Ray mandated revolutionary concepts, solidly establishing within twenty years a tax based on income, convinced Ostia to standardize currency and measurements, and reconstructed Caelin with the help of civil engineers and architects from Araphen, its proudest supporter.

That is not to say that it became a most prosperous canton, however. Its topography resulted in annual floods that devastated the western half of the canton, and the well-intended flood relief efforts literally taxed Caelin's resources until it sank into turbulent times again less than fifty years after its independence. Fortunately, the volatile situation was smashed down by Ostia. Unfortunately, Ostia's involvement was triggered by the killing of the marquess's younger sister's fiancé, Sir Ash Ketchum, in what was officially reported as a skirmish. [4] Fortunately, Caelin stabilized into a sovereign unit again under a politically capable advisor left in charge by Ostia. Unfortunately, the Ostia-loyal advisor was a despot whose descendants evolved into the line that would finish Caelin 200 years later.

Perhaps at this very moment, Lycian scholars are still debating whether or not it was Ostia that planted the infected seeds that would doom Caelin. Its eagerness to annex Caelin in response to Lady Lyndis's abdication of the throne could not be overlooked, after all. However, I myself am not of that opinion, for, once again, the factor of Laus must be considered. But I shall return to Ostia's motivations and Laus's involvement at a later time. For now, let us consider the events that set the stage for the fall of Caelin.

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**Notes:**

[1]Those who are not of Etrurian origin would more likely know The Foray as Aquliea Academy of Anima Arts. Given that the title begins with four A's of the Eliminean alphabet, the academy informally came to be called The Foray.

[2] The ancient language of magic—and the colloquial tongue of dragons, according to Archsage Athos.

[3] This is phonetic translation from Lycian dialects. There have been so many wars between Ostia and Laus that Lord Lundgren of Caelin managed to fill three inch-thick volumes of essays and analysis on this topic alone. Upon request of Knight General Percival, I shall translate these as soon as I retire.

[4] Rumor has it Sir Ash Ketchum was in truth assassinated by a Laus guerilla group bitter at the loss of Caelin and intent on amplifying its civil unrest. He was targeted for his connection to Lady Misty, Ostia's ambassador to Caelin.

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**:D I was sad that Johnnathan didn't go off on a couple more tangents, but I guess I made up for it in other ways. Hope you enjoyed what little I could share at the moment. I'm relatively set on how this story will proceed, but if you have ever come with crack cameos, drop it off in a review or PM and I'll see what I can weasel in. See you in a couple days!**


	3. 1 How Lady Lyndis Happened

**See me in a couple days? Yeah, that didn't happen. (bangs head against the wall) All right, here goes.**

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"_There was a lord, and daughter one_

_Who loved the earth beneath the sun,_

_And all the people she loved well,_

_But no one like Hassar_

_Who came from fields of far away_

_Where arrows rain and stallions play_

_How did they meet? No one can tell_

_No one except Hassar_

_How did that man so bearded strange_

_Have gall to make dear Love arrange_

_Itself before them like a spell_

_And take them both afar?_

"_How did he?" shouts the lonely night_

_That witnessed the lord's fateful plight_

_Whose sorrow he can only tell_

_To what remained: the stars."_

_Rough translation from the beloved Lycian songbook, **The Bard and the Green Lance**_

**Chapter 1: How Lady Lyndis Happened**

963 was a most eventful year for Caelin. The Black Plague was at this time not yet prevalent in Etruria, but it would leave Lycian ports aboard the cargo ships within the year. Caelin's royalty was devastated by the non-discriminating disease. Within days of each other, Marquess Franz, Marchioness Ganymede and their daughter-in-law Lyndis succumbed, soon to leave the heir Hausen with his marriageable daughter Madelyn and his younger brother Lundgren as his only kin. Yet Fate was not satisfied. Allow me to make clearer to you the true impact by taking a hypothetical journey to Caelin.

It must have been winter at that time in 963 when the Sacaen was seen with his thick garb and his thick, garbling tongue. Perhaps he had committed some crime hideous even by Sacaen standards, and was sent to find the wandering swordsman Dayan of the Kutolah for repentance. In any case, the Sacaen man who would become Lady Madelyn's husband was named Hassar. He must have been tall, lean and agile, leading his three horses through the death-laden streets of Caelin. The cold smothered the remains of decay and held the transmitters of disease in its biting teeth. Light snow sugared the fermenting truth like a liar. The sky was pregnant with tears and repressed them until dusk came, so Hassar had run through the streets, already numb, before coming to the unmanned gates of Castle Caelin, the unmanned gates now associated with death. He encountered only one, familiar knight upon the inner drawbridge of the castle where the Sacaen hoped to seek shelter. That knight might have had hair at that time, but his name was definitely Wallace, the same Wallace that would grant Hassar mercy not once but twice and would become the retired general of Caelin that would protect Hassar's daughter from Caelin's most loyal knights.

"Back again? Did no one warn you of this place, Hassar?" Wallace might have asked, with his…graying hair tucked deep inside a freezing helmet. He flexed his fingers around his lance, spun it with one hand, more to reawaken his arm than to intimidate Hassar.

"No matter where you go, there is always death in snow," responded Hassar with an old Sacaen proverb. He gave the older man the intense glare of a hawk, but that was simply his permanent expression. "If I do not die, my horses will. My people live and die with horses."

"So you've told me many a time," grumbled Wallace, dissatisfied. In an attempt to move the man from his emotionless confidence, he continued, "My lords mourn our deceased marquess and marchioness, and will not receive you this time."

"I have never taken their time."

Wallace seemed to deflate somewhat as he nodded. "If there was anywhere else I could recommend, Hassar, I would now." Wallace was known to have long tried to press Hassar into service of Caelin, when Hassar had last passed through Caelin several years before, but Hassar had been as silently adamant as he was at the moment. "Then come with me, if you do not fear the breath of death." And he led Hassar into the castle, little knowing what Fate intended for the both of them.

Marquess Hausen's only daughter had been shedding her tears at the window. She wiped them away to see a bold visitor with not one but three horses approach the castle with Sir Wallace. Searching for relief in another's pain or company in another's misery—as is human nature—she had come crashing down the grand stairwells to dislodge the frozen double doors for the knight and the newcomer and the three horses, desperate to ask to whom the other two horses belonged and to share her sympathy with more tears, if that pleased the man.

But Hassar took no notice of her, thinking her frenzied state of hair and plain mourning dress to be that of a servant's, and his eyes fell instead on the stairwells behind her, on the pale stained glass windows that left ghosts of imprints upon the floors, upon the vases with withered flowers and the candlesticks covered in cobwebs. Perhaps even she seemed a desolate object enclosed by the heavy double doors that slowly careened back to their natural state, closed, shutting out the wind and shutting in the silence.

"Lady Madelyn," Sir Wallace broke the silence. "I shall attend this man. Please return to your mother's side."

"My mother is dead."

Now Sir Wallace might have said nothing at all, or he would have supplied the necessary condolences as he had prepared to do for the last three days, as he had done twice already. But nonetheless he was firm in his stance: "Then please attend to your father. He is in the most haphazard state."

"The whole _world_ is in a most haphazard state, good sir knight. Allow me some relief. I shall accompany you."

Hassar had watched the exchange with the utmost care. He had only conversed in the Lycian language for a year and a half at the most, and was keen to test his knowledge and improve his skills so that he might be better able to communicate his thoughts without relying on his unnerving gaze. But the last half of the conversation was completely lost in examining the most interesting presence in the castle: a woman whose lips carried death. Sir Wallace was much too busy having his patience tested by the willful woman to see this, but Lady Madelyn had noticed Hassar's entranced stare and once glanced back to reassure herself of it, too tired to pretend to be abashed and too sick at heart not to cling to it for escape.

They said nothing to each other in that castle. There might have been more bantering between the lady and the knight as they accommodated Hassar to hard bread for the heart and hot wine for the soul. The lady fasted and watched Hassar eat, asking nothing, saying nothing, only watching his hands smash a frozen flatbread to pieces. He picked them up, even off the floor, and let them sink into his wine until they thawed into something chewable. She thought nothing of it, thought nothing at all of anything. Four floors above her head, her father cried himself to sleep.

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The next morning there was a storm. Lord Lundgren, Lady Madelyn's uncle, crashed down the stairs and through the halls and into the kitchens, calling frantically for the cook.

"The cook is dead," replied Lady Madelyn, sitting on the same bench Hassar had occupied the previous afternoon, sitting with a hot goblet of wine. She did not look want to look at her uncle's wide eyes. She did not want to hear what he had to say. Was it her father this time?

Lord Lundgren looked at his niece, uncomprehending. "Is that so?" He stood demented in his bath slippers, his fine black hair crowding his thinning face and touching the bones of his jaws when it swayed, so that he sometimes jumped at it as if it were a recently discovered spider.

"We're all going to die, Uncle."

Lord Lundgren nodded. "We are born knowing that. Even Joan." He slowly swayed his way out again, slipping out of the doors with nary a sound, as if he didn't want to disturb his doomed child four floors above him.

Lady Madelyn's wine started tasting of salt.

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When Hassar came into the kitchens, as he had been instructed to do whenever hunger overcame him, the wine goblet was rolling in circles along its rim, the seated lady teasing it in tortuous turns with fingers long enough to be suited well for a bow. She looked up at him and they shared a long glance, but then she looked back down and continued to roll her goblet. When she realized Hassar did not know what to do, where to find his sustenance, she pushed herself off the ground heavily. Her sigh rang heavy in their ears, as did the scrape of cheap whiskey from a cupboard. She did not know where the bread was; she hadn't been watching Wallace earlier. The late Marquess Franz, her grandfather, had ordered the servants to leave in the interest of safety in the numbers—in _fewer _numbers. Most left to tend to their own families and flee the castle when they realized the disease—transmitted by fleas— spread more quickly with concentrations of people. Now Lady Madelyn had even learned to wash her grandparents' soiled clothing when her own mother could no longer do so. Her father, ashamed to bring his daughter thus, could not look at her any longer.

She held out the whiskey bottle to Hassar, her hand wrapped around its body so Hassar would have to pull her fingers off. Or so she thought. He merely grasped the top of the bottle and pulled it up out of her hands. She almost expected a spiteful, laughing, popping noise when her hand closed on itself, but instead heard nothing as Hassar, without a word, without an expression, took his silent steps to the kitchen door and turned into a shadow.

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At that time Lady Madelyn had not seen her father since before her mother died and wondered how he discovered it, if he did. Lady Madelyn had taken several bottles of that coarse whiskey to the stables that night and, keeping one for herself, fed Hassar's three horses the rest and, giggling, her bottle untouched, fell asleep watching the horses drool and struggle to stand to sleep properly.

Hassar found her before dawn could crawl into the sky. He himself was set for travel and he had planned to ready the horses by dawn. His rage at what she had done to the horses dissipated when she, awoken by his cursing and drunk from insufficient sleep, lifted herself up and, stretching to her tiptoes, tried to place her lips against his and landed instead in his beard.

One can certainly imagine what ensued henceforth. Had Lady Madelyn acted in this way at a time when one's primary concern did extend beyond how long until the daughter or husband or father or what-have-you packed up and left for Heaven, such horrifying behavior would have been Caelin's greatest scandal, aside from the shocking discovery of Sir Kent's true love some twenty or so years later. (Now, Sir Kent plays an enormous role in the almost forgotten true history of Caelin, but all in good time, all in good time.) In any case, Lady Madelyn had disappeared from the castle shortly after the arrival of the strange Sacaen man by name of Hassar, and three days later Sir Wallace was holding his lance at Hassar's throat.

Rather he attempted to. In his own account to Sir Kent, Sir Wallace had said the lovers defended themselves by pleading, "I am to blame. Do not harm the other." He further rationalized, "Would you have dragged Lady Madelyn back to the castle, ending their chance for love? She might have taken her own life if faced with such grief." Thus, he turned a blind eye as they crossed the Caelin-Khathelet border, spent six months in prison for his failure to return the lady to her father, and was executed nineteen years later when truth came to light to Caelin's public after the Battle of the Damned.

963, I believe, pronounced doom impending upon Caelin. With most of the royalty victims to the plague, both brothers became bereft of heirs. Neither was willing to marry again. No one can say what they had in mind, only that the citizenry did not panic about it at the time because they were far too busy panicking about other things.

But in seventeen more years, the vaunted Lady Lyndis would give them much more to panic about.

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**For those of you who haven't realized it, Johnnathan is giving a completely opinionated account of history. :P I think it's hilarious. **

**Also, I have the impression that the constant references to what happens 20ish/17ish years later (980s) makes it seem more...historical, tying older events to more recent events so all the events truly do seem like the past. Would that be an accurate impression?**

**And does the sweeping into story mode with history-related commentary seem off at all to anyone other than me? Or is it smoother and more acceptable than I think? I've got the ideas for the story down, but I'm having difficulty formatting it not only to be...a historical account, but also to Johnnathan's character.**

**Sorry it's so short. (scratch head) I just...need to keep working. (turns to stash of chocolate chips I'm not supposed to have) Motivation! Here you are! **

**Anyway, thank you for reading!**


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